For mobile app developers, few pieces of post-deployment data are as important as crash logs. It’s valuable to have information about who is using apps and how often, but if developers aren’t able to see why and how frequently their apps are crashing, long-term app usage will suffer.
Last week, we discussed changes to geodata in the App47 platform. This week, we’re pleased to announce some new changes to the way iOS crash logs are handled. We hope this change will make it easier than ever for people who use our platform to understand why their apps crash.
On Android and Windows, it’s easy to capture crash logs and show users where in the code the crash happened. Pinpointing exactly where and why the crash occurred is invaluable to solving the problem. iOS makes it a bit more complicated; in iOS formatted crash logs, all of the stack frames are written in symbols. In order to be useful, those symbols need to be converted (“symbolicated”) so developers can see where in the code the crash happened.
When we first got started, we used Google’s Mobile Toolkit to pull iOS crash logs. The advantage to that approach is that you don’t need to decode the symbol files. The drawback is that, without decoding, you can only see the thread the crash happens on, rather than pinpointing it down to a specific location. This is better than nothing, but is less than ideal if you want to understand exactly what went wrong.
We’ve kept the original approach and added in the more comprehensive symbolicated crash logs. Now, if you upload your dSYM file and upgrade your agent to 2.4, the platform will generate symbolicated iOS crash logs that pinpoint crashes down to a specific location.
The long and the short of it is that this feature update gives you more detailed iOS crash logs. Again, we think this change will be a big improvement for developers after their apps are deployed.
A note on device symbols: with the launch of this new feature, we need to collect as many permutations of iOS symbols as possible. We’ve captured as many of them as we can, but we need your help. If you’d like to participate in making App47 crash logs more accurate and complete by sharing your device symbols, please email support@app47.com.
